


The World's a Little Brighter

by Flynne



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/M, Maxwell Trevelyan - Freeform, Older Woman/Younger Man, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-02
Updated: 2019-05-02
Packaged: 2020-02-16 07:31:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18686950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flynne/pseuds/Flynne
Summary: Max has been falling for Cassandra since the earliest days of their acquaintance. He thinks she knows, but he doesn’t know what she thinks.





	The World's a Little Brighter

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from "Accidentally in Love" by Counting Crows.

It didn’t take long for Max to realize that the  _ idea _ of Cassandra throwing him around and the actual  _ experience _ of being thrown around by Cassandra were two very different things. To be precise, it took five bruising minutes of their first practice session for it to sink in. 

Still, he was game for it. Even if he hadn’t been looking for more excuses to be around her, she and Cullen were right: he needed to learn at least  _ some _ self defense. Which was why even after he’d stumbled away from their first session on aching legs, he found himself opposite her once more two days later, bracing himself while she whacked at his staff with a blunted blade. 

“Hiding is not going to help you!” she snapped, stalking after him when he ducked behind a practice dummy.

“It does when I hide behind Bull!” he replied, trying not to wheeze. Even if Skyhold’s elevation didn’t seem to bother  _ her _ , he (and everybody else who was not a preternaturally gifted warrior) had not had time to adjust to the thin air. 

“Hiding behind someone swinging a double-bladed axe is ill-advised.” She rounded the practice dummy and pressed him back, herding him with sword and shield despite his best efforts to hold her off. 

“Well, it’s - oof!” Max staggered back a few paces as she shunted aside his staff with her shield and slammed into him. “It’s worked so far.”

Her already stern expression darkened. “I will need to have a talk with him.”

Max barely raised his staff in time to fend off another blow, hands stinging sharply with the effort of holding on. Cassandra shifted her weight to her back foot before slashing down at him again. He saw her coming and threw himself to the side in a clumsy dodge. The blow missed, but he stumbled, foot sliding awkwardly beneath him. His ankle flared with pain and he let out a yelp as he tumbled to the ground. 

Cassandra paused, towering over him. “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” he said automatically, reaching for his dropped staff. He planted it in the ground and tried to rise, but as soon as he put pressure on his right foot his leg buckled and he thumped back to the ground with a grunt of pain. “Urgh. No.”

“Hold still a moment.” Cassandra set aside her weapons and knelt in front of him, taking hold of his booted foot with both hands. 

“Ow,” Max said, more as a reflex than a real protest. But when she started loosening the buckles, he flinched. “Ow,” he said again, more insistently. She ignored him and slowly but steadily pulled his boot off. “Ow ow ow  _ OW! _ Easy!” he said reproachfully, reaching for his injured limb.

She pushed his hands aside, firmly taking hold of his ankle. “If you wanted someone to coddle you, you should have gone to Cullen.”

Max leaned back on his hands, wincing as she peeled off his sweaty sock. “He’s not my type.”

Cassandra let out an exasperated sigh but didn’t look up from her inspection. “You are certainly persistent.”

“I’ve been called worse.” He answered her flat glare with a lopsided smile, but it didn’t last. The initial pain of the injury had faded slightly, but his ankle was already beginning to swell, throbbing with every heartbeat, and he let out a hiss as she manipulated the joint. Her touch couldn’t be called gentle by any stretch of the imagination, but she was careful - he could tell that she knew what she was doing, and her handling of his leg didn’t cause him any more pain. 

In spite of his discomfort, he couldn’t help the exhilarated thrum that ran along his nerves at how close she was, shooting straight up his leg through his spine and tingling at the base of his skull. He knew he’d made himself ridiculous at times, hoping for just a bit more of her attention, but even though she seemed completely impervious to him, she’d never explicitly rebuffed him or told him to go; and he knew her well enough by now to know that she would have no qualms about firmly putting him in his place if his presence and tentative advances were entirely unwelcome.

Still, he wanted to be sure, and he didn’t want any boneheadedness on his part to ruin this...whatever sort of friendship or understanding that might be growing between them. She had him at a definite disadvantage now, and if she walked away he definitely couldn’t chase after her, so...what better time to get things out in the open? 

His chest tightened and his shortness of breath had nothing to do with the thin mountain air. “Cassandra…listen.” She paused, but didn’t look up. “You know I admire you. But, um…” His stomach swooped nervously, but after a dry swallow he forced himself to keep going. “I’ve been coming around a lot. To see you. I know I’m...well, persistent, but I don’t want to be a bother. And if nothing else, I  _ do _ want to be your friend. So if you want me to stop coming around so much, I will.” 

Cassandra didn’t look up. She didn’t even act as if she’d heard, but although her hands were steady around his ankle, she’d gone completely still. 

When she still didn’t answer, Max wet his lips, flushing at the unsteady sound of his voice as he asked, “So, do you? Want me to stop?”

Her brows drew together, and after an agonizing pause, she said, “No.”

Max twitched in surprise. “What?...really?” A relieved breath gusted out of him and he had to fight to swallow back the bundle of nerves dancing in his stomach, dangerously close to escaping as a laugh. “You - ”

“Your ankle isn’t broken, only badly sprained,” she interrupted. “You need sturdier boots.” When she lifted her head to look at him her expression was as stern as ever, but there was a definite rosiness to her cheeks that her most forbidding scowl couldn’t hide, and he couldn’t keep back his grin. Predictably, she ignored it. “Can you heal it?”

“Um.” Sheepishness clashed disorientingly with elation in his chest. She huffed at him and his face heated for a different reason beneath the weight of her disapproval. “I was a  _ circle _ mage,” he said defensively, draping his arm across her shoulders as she moved to help him up. “I didn’t think I’d need to know any of that.”

Her arm was an iron bar around his waist as she steered him toward the nearby armory. “And yet you had no trouble with your mastery of storm magic.”

“Well, that was different. That was fun.” Max leaned on his staff and hopped along next to her, letting her deposit him on a sturdy wooden table. He gave a little sigh of relief when he saw the armory was empty for the moment, the forge smoldering quietly, with no one there to witness his mishap. He scooted back on the tabletop, extending his good leg in front of him while pulling his other knee up to his chest to move his injured ankle closer. He grimaced at the sight of it, already beginning to bruise. 

“You have been going into battle for months, with no way to heal yourself,” Cassandra said, crossing her arms. 

“Listen, I know a  _ little _ ,” Max said, finally bristling a bit. He cupped his hands around the injury, letting a trickle of mana chill his palms and begin to ease the swelling and the worst of the hurt. “Before you think ill of me, I wasn’t trying to shirk,” he said, keeping his eyes on his hands. “I just...the Ostwick circle was nice and all, but it was just a pretty prison. I knew I was going to live there, never leave, and eventually die there.” His voice wavered now for a different reason, and he made himself give a loose, dismissive shrug, pretending the words didn’t catch in his throat on their way out. “Learning spells to heal injuries I’d never get seemed like a waste of everybody’s time.”

Cassandra answered him with her usual silence. When he finally looked up, he was surprised to see the thoughtful look on her face. “I don’t think ill of you,” she said slowly. “And I understand how you felt.”

He remembered then what she’d told him about her own childhood - except somehow, she’d given herself wings to escape her gilded cage on her own, where he was only free by a tragedy and a trick of fate, and there was no guarantee it would last. And he saw that Cassandra knew it, too; saw the caution in her eyes as she looked at him. Max felt his heart start to sink, because no matter what she’d said to him outside just now, if they ever managed to defeat Corypheus and if the Chantry ever managed to pull its head out of its own ass, unless something changed, odds were that he and all other mages would be locked away again for good. 

But her expression softened and she gently rested her hand on his shoulder, saying quietly, “I will ask one of the healers among the mages to come, and they can teach you.” 

Max realized his mouth was hanging open as he gazed up at her and he hastily shut it, keeping very still beneath her palm. “Okay,” he managed to answer. Her hand shifted, gliding up from his shoulder to rest lightly against his face. His heart stopped, quivered, and flipped over, and then she turned away, walking purposefully out the door in search of a healer.

The knot of emotions in his chest untangled itself and slipped out as a laugh. He’d botched his second training session, his ankle ached, and his right boot and sock were still outside next to a practice dummy. But he still felt the touch of Cassandra’s hand against his cheek, and her approval - stern and reserved though it was - warmed him like a ray of sunshine. 

The rumble of voices outside reached his ears as the blacksmiths drew near to return to their work, and he ducked his head, pressing his forehead against his knee to hide his giddy smile.


End file.
